I had intended to continue this series by talking about some of the other forms of sharing that I think should define the Christian community. However, as this series progresses, I am continually confronted with the fact that one of the largest obstacles to embodying a form of Christianity that offers a genuine alternative to capitalism is that we just don't really want to live another way — thus, in Part II, I wrote about a “crisis of willing” and, in Part V, I spoke about the “hold” that a consumer lifestyle has on most Western Christians.
Therefore, in this post, I would like to take a step back, and explore why this is such a problem. And, to do that, I would like to begin with a quote from Slavoj Zizek.
Jenny Holzer's famous truism 'Protect me from what I want'… can either be read as an ironic reference to the standard male chauvinist wisdom that a woman left to herself gets caught up in self-destructive fury — she needs to be protected from herself by benevolent male domination: 'Protect me from the excessive self-destructive desire in me that I myself am not able to dominate.' Or else it can be read in a more radical way, as pointing towards the fact that in today's patriarchal society, women's desire is radically alienated: she desires what men expect her to desire, desires to be desired by men. In this case, 'Protect me from what I want' means: 'Precisely when I seem to express my authentic innermost longing, “what I want” has already been imposed on me by the patriarchal order that tells me what to desire, so the first condition of my liberation is that I break the vicious cycle of my alienated desire and learn to formulate my desire in an autonomous way.
~ Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan, 38-39.
I choose to quote this passage from Zizek in full at the opening of this post because I think he provides an excellent example of one of the ways in which our social setting conditions and alienates even our most “authentic and innermost longing.” What we learn from Zizek (and even more from Foucault!) is that society disciplines our desires — it forms us in such a way that we “naturally” end up finding some things desirable and other things undesirable.
Thus, those of us who live in a society dominated by capitalism need to recognise that even our most “authentic and innermost longings” have been conditioned by capitalism. What we desire ends up being that which sustains and strengthens the structures of capitalism, and what we find undesirable is that which challenges capitalism.
What Zizek's example shows is just how insidious this conditioning of desire can end up being. Thus, even those who realize that their desire has been conditioned, still find that their longings function in an alienated manner. In Zizek's example we see a woman that awakens to the realisation that patriarchy has conditioned her to desire to be desired by men… yet she still desires to be desired by men. Thus, her cry becomes: “Protect me from what I want!”
It is not hard to think of other examples. I know many Christian men who have awakened to the realisation that capitalism conditions them to treat women as (sexual) objects (after all, if people can be made into objects, then they can become goods that can be bought, sold, and consumed). However, these men also discover that they are still attracted to those things that present women as (sexual) objects — objects that even desire their own consumption! In this way we end up with a great deal of Christian men addicted to internet pornography. Their cry also becomes: “Protect us from what we want!”
What really got me thinking about all this in more detail was something a friend of mine wrote recently. He and his wife are rooted in an innercity neighbourhood and trying to find ways of journeying alongside of the people there. He wrote this:
I've talked about doing a lot of things… I wanted to have people over for dinners, to invite those I find on the street into my home to hang out and eat. I also wanted to be involved in the local school… I want to spend time with my neighbours… However, as days, then weeks and finally years go by, and I haven't acted…I begin to ask myself why.
[A]nd the answer always comes back…because I don't really, truly, want to. If I did, then I would.
Therefore, if the Christian community is to exist as a truly genuine alternative to capitalism we need another Reformation. However, we need something that goes deeper than a re-formation of doctrine; what we need is a re-formation of desire. How then can we begin to engage in such a re-formation?
Awakening to the truth of our situation is an important first step. Later in his book on Lacan, Zizek argues that Lacan believed that our desires have become conditioned because our lives are based upon fantasy. Fantasy, according to Zizek, serves two functions: first, it serves as a screen that protects us from being overwhelmed by the truly traumatic truth of the reality of our situation; and, second, it literally teaches us how to desire. This second point is especially instructive, for, as Zizek says, “fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality I fantasize about eating it,” rather, he goes on to say, fantasy is that which teaches me to desire the strawberry cake in the first place (consequently, we learn why capitalism and modern technology fit so well together — the internet, television, and film, along with all forms of advertising, become the means of inundating us with fantasies that teach us how to desire). Thus, Zizek concludes that: “For Lacan, the ultimate ethical task is that of true awakening: not only from sleep, but from the spell of fantasy that controls us even more when we are awake.”
However, awakening to reality, and choosing to remain in the place where we are confronted with “unbearable, traumatic truth” (Zizek), is only half of the solution. For, as we saw above, we can learn that our desires our warped but that knowledge does not re-form those desires.
Therefore, it is useful to comment a bit more on my friend's example. The reason why my friend draws the conclusion that he does, is because he is reflecting upon something he recently read — a passage where a man, who had visited a monastery for a few days, asks a monk how he can continue patterns of prayer in his daily life. The monk responds with these words: “The first thing is that you have to want to pray. No amount of discipline or exercise or reading will do it if there is no desire.” The monk may be correct to assert that “no amount of discipline” will inspire prayer if there is no desire to pray. However, what the monk fails to mention (as far as I can tell) is that we must learn the disciplines that will condition us to desire to pray (of course, the paradox in this is that it is often the practice of regular prayer that disciplines us to want to pray so that we can pray regularly — which is why another monk once said, “Fake it, until you make it”!)
If the Christian community is to offer a genuine alternative to capitalism, it must be a place the exercises counter-disciplines to the disciplines of capitalism (this point is one that runs through the writings of Daniel M. Bell Jr. [cf. Liberation Theology after the End of History: the refusal to cease suffering] and William T. Cavanaugh [cf. Torture and Eucharist and Theopolitical Imagination]). In this regard, things like baptism, the Eucharist, the Church calendar, the liturgy, and the spiritual disciplines gain a new relevance. These things, far from being “spiritual” activities that are divorced from our day-to-day lives, are the practices that can re-form our desires.
However, developing counter-disciplines is also only a part of the solution. There is one more crucial component necessary for the re-formation of desire.
In Ro 7, Paul writes the following words:
For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want… I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good… I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?
In this passage, Paul is describing a person who has awakened to the reality that his or her desire has been conditioned and warped by outside influences. However, although this person comes to this realisation (in “the law of my mind”), he or she is incapable of acting differently (because of “the law of sin which is in my members”). Thus, the person concludes by crying out: “Protect me from what I want” (i.e. “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?”).
However, the crucial thing to realise is that Paul is not describing his experience as a Christian in this passage. Rather, he is describing his pre-conversion experience from a post-conversion perspective. After all, Ro 7 leads directly to Ro 8, where Paul goes on to describe his post-conversion experience, and, in doing so, he provides us with the answer to the question of “Who will set me free from the body of this death?” and the response to the cry: Protect me from what I want!”
In Ro 8, we learn that it is the Spirit of God who liberates our desire and makes new ways of living genuinely possible. This leaves us, rather uncomfortably, in a place of radical dependence. The re-formation of desire depends, ultimately, upon the in-breaking of God's Spirit.
By way of conclusion, it is worth recalling the experience of the disciples with Jesus. The disciples were those whose desires had been disciplined — they wanted Rome to be overthrown, they wanted the Jewish state to be restored, and they wanted to be the new rulers of that newly reconstituted state. In essence, their desires had been conditioned by their culture, and even though Jesus tried to teach them to desire other things (like desiring to serve others instead of desiring to be served by others) they never really got the point. Even when it looked like they understood what Jesus was saying, they were still unable to act out of that new understanding. Thus, even though we see the disciples all swearing that they would never betray Jesus, when the time comes we see them all run away. The disciples want to be loyal to Jesus, but their desires have been so disciplined that none of them are. It is only the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost that changes everything. After the Spirit comes we see the re-formation of the disciples desires, and we see those re-formed desires inspiring truly new, and wonderful, actions and results within the Christian community.
Now, what is particularly encouraging about all this (apart from the fact that it shows us that God's Spirit does break-in and re-form desire), is that Jesus commits himself to working with disciples whose desires have not yet been fully re-formed. Tom Wright captures this idea well when he writes the following:
[Jesus'] disciples, longing for a leader who would fulfill their dreams, were bound to hear his call to revolutionary love in terms of their own love of revolution. Jesus worked within that misunderstanding. It is just as well that he did. If the creator of the world had waited for a time when people would have understood his desire to save the world, and would have responded without ambiguity to that desire, he would have waited for ever (New Tasks for a Renewed Church, 50).
Therefore, let us continue to confront, and expose, the “traumatic” reality of our contemporary situation within capitalism, let us learn to develop the disciplines that re-form our desires, and let us continually cry out for the Spirit to be poured out upon us anew so that the re-formation of a Christian community out of capitalism will be fulfilled, all the while hoping that Jesus is, somehow, working, even now, within our misunderstandings.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
~ Paul, Gal 5.1
I would now like to move into some of the more concrete outworkings of what I have been exploring in this series on Christianity and capitalism by exploring some of the ways in which the nonsensical charity of Christianity should play out in our contemporary context.
First of all, I would like to envision both the sharing that prevents debt and the sharing of debt within the Christian community. Few things are so effective in ensuring the unchallenged sovereignty of capitalism as the structures of debt that pervade all areas of our society. Debt ensures that we remain in a state akin to slavery. We are held in bondage by the credit companies, the banks, the government, the powers (and just like slavery in days gone by, so also we have trouble imagining an economic system that does not rely on debt).
It is interesting to note that even at the time of Jesus, debt was perceived to be one of the main structures that maintained oppressive powers. Thus, first-century Jewish liberation movements addressed debt as a central issue. It is worth highlighting two examples. During the “Great Revolt” of the Jews against Rome (AD 66-70), one of the first things the revolutionaries did was burn the debt records (cf. Josephus' Wars, 2:427). However, some thirty years prior to this revolt another alternative had been initiated — Jesus began a community that “held all things in common” so that “no one was in need” and in this way a powerful, yet nonviolent, alternative to the structures of debt was established and quietly began to grow and move towards the heart of the empire. The first option, the option taken by the Jewish revolutionaries (which, by the way, is the same option as the one taken by Tyler Durden in Fight Club) is, however, one that is forever closed to those who pursue the second option, the option taken by Jesus.
Therefore, the first step to being liberated from capitalism is to also refuse debt as an option within our lives. However, if the avoidance of debt is to be a realistic option for many of us (especially those of us who are poor and on the margins) we must begin to share financially with one another. This means doing “nonsensical” things like having a community that sponsors a person's university education so that that person isn't driven into debt by a Student Loan. This means doing things like supporting poor parents so that they can raise children without taking out loans and cash advances in order to get by. This also means living in a community where possession of credit cards is mostly a non-option. Living as a credit free society means moving through a series of steps. The first step would be to limit the number of credit cards within a household. Then, as we realise that we are doing fine by sharing one another's expenses, we could limit the number of credit cards within a particular Christian community and, ultimately, I believe that we could arrive at a place where there is no need for credit cards within the Christian community. When we can rely on one another for financial assistance then the drive to maintain a credit card in order to have a “good credit rating” (i.e. the drive to ensure that the slave-masters stay happy with us) becomes unnecessary.
However, because few of us are living in a state where we are free from debt, we need to realise that, if we are to share in ways that offer a genuinely liberating alternative, we must also share the debts that have already been accrued by other members of the Christian community. There are few actions that would be considered more nonsensical within capitalism than voluntarily paying off the debt of another person, but to engage in this sort of activity is the only honest option for a community that has been taught to pray for the forgiveness of debts (remember the Lord's Prayer?). This sharing of debt, that shares debt in order to overcome debt itself, should be a central aspect of the Church's proclamation of forgiveness. When we start living in this way, then maybe we will be able to remember that the gospel is literally good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, and release for the oppressed. Of course, by describing the gospel in this way, I am quoting Jesus' “mission statement” as it appears in Lk 4, and it is interesting to note that this mission statement draws upon Israel's Jubilee tradition — a tradition that was centred upon the forgiveness of all financial and material debts!
It seems to me that the steps I have described here are quite simple to follow… but for one thing. That “thing” is the hold that a consumer lifestyle still has on most Western Christians. To pursue these simple steps we must begin to engage in a form of charity that restructures our lives and restricts our access to possessions, entertainment, and personal indulgences. The forms of charity that make sense within capitalism are forms that do not hinder my access to these things. Thus, just how genuinely Christian our charity is will be revealed by how willing we are to surrender precisely these things as we learn to share in new ways. I am reminded, once again, of the words of Mother Teresa who once said the following:
I don't want you to give from your excess. I want you to give in a way that hurts.
If we only give from our excess, our giving does not create an alternative to the structures of capitalism; rather it ensures that we remain the slaves of credit companies, banks, and governments. Only when we give “in a way that hurts” do we begin to embody a Christian alternative to capitalism that liberates us from debt.

The conviction that siblings are to make use in common of their inherited goods undergirds the exhortation to benefit and share with one another within the community… As siblings in Christ, the believers are to pool their resources in every way so that each member of the family knows the love of this family at his or her point of need…
What we witness in the early church is not an attempt to create a system of government and economics enforced through terror but rather an attitude that each believer has toward fellow believers—“love for brothers and sisters”—and lives without reservation.
~ David A. deSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity, 215-16.
I was first personally introduced to a more radical form of sharing through my interactions with another community of “beggars” — the homeless addicts that I first encountered in Toronto, and continue to encounter in the neighbourhood in which I live. Within this community, sharing looks rather different than the form of sharing that is encouraged in the churches I know (you know, tithe 10%, donate tax write-offs to charity, and give your old clothes to the Salvation Army, that sort of thing). Indeed, the sharing demonstrated in this community of beggars shames most Christian expressions of sharing.
I think, for example, of “Johnny.” Johnny is a gifted young man who lives for music… but one day he pawned his guitar so that he had enough money to support his heroin addiction. “I put my soul in the pawn shop today,” he said to me. Heroin meant so much to Johnny that he was willing to risk losing the thing he loved above all else in order to get high. But here's the catch: when it came time to shoot up, Johnny didn't think twice about sharing what he had with his friends. Indeed, one sees this all the time with addicts — they will surrender everything they have to score one point of heroin, or one rock, or whatever, yet they will, time after time, share that point, or that rock, or whatever, with their friends. The only thing that they have, the thing that they have sacrificed everything to get, this is what they share.
I believe that those of us who are eager to be anything but beggars would argue that applying this standard to our approach to sharing would be completely nonsensical. Capitalism does not teach us to share all that we have, and it certainly does not teach us to share that which we surrender everything else to get. Far from it. Capitalism teaches me to hold desperately to the core of what mine, just as it teaches me that, if I work hard to get something, then I don't have to share it with anybody. In fact, I'll work just as hard to ensure that such a precious thing stays mine.
Thus, capitalism conditions us to think that there is, in fact, little that is virtuous in the form of sharing that I have just described — it would tell us that I simply provided an example of beggars preying on other beggars in order to move deeply into self-destructive addictions. Therefore, my argument that such a destructive act as sharing drugs should be considered virtuous would be discarded as a nonsensical argument. However, although this objection is cloaked in the language of moral/charitable concern (i.e. “drugs are bad, and giving highly addictive drugs to your friends is very bad”), I suspect that, at its root, it is motivated by the fear of being genuinely confronted with a form of sharing that goes far beyond anything we have ever offered.
Thus, I persist in believing that this “nonsensical” form of sharing should challenge the form of sharing embodied in our community of beggars — the Church (not so say that there isn't a great deal of overlap in the two communities of beggars that I am talking about here). Furthermore, that our sharing does not appear to be just as nonsensical leads me to suspect that what is genuinely Christian about our sharing might have been lost.
That Christian sharing should appear nonsensical to those whose ways of living are dictated by capitalism becomes evident when we realise that the sharing (or “charity”) that is praised by capitalism (i.e. the charity that “makes sense” within capitalism) is actually a mode of charity that perpetuates the foundational structures of capitalism. The ways in which Western nations have used “foreign aid” to drive other nations into debt is perhaps the most obvious example of this, but other examples abound: the ways in which Christian social agencies and churches perpetuate the structures of capitalism by accepting charitable donations from major corporations should be considered, as we should also consider the ways in which popular approaches to tithing allow me to give 10% of my earnings to a church/charity and then feel fine about spending the remaining 90% on me. Christian sharing, however, must move beyond such superficial forms of charity in order to offer a genuine alternative to capitalism. And I suspect that such sharing will be labeled “nonsensical” because it will appear to be “impractical,” “wasteful,” or “foolish.”
So what are some of the concrete forms of sharing that should take place within the Christian community if we are to live as an alternative to capitalism? I'll get to that soon (I hope).

In a recent post, I argued that we needed to understand justice as living out the gratitude that is proper to those who are recipients of grace. Furthermore, I suggested understanding justice in this way has significant implications for how we go about pursuing justice today. I have continued to turn this around in my mind — asking myself questions like: what exactly are those implications? — and I was led back to a point made by a British theologian, David Ford.
In his book, The Shape of Living, Ford argues that our lives are shaped by “overwhelmings.” We all encounter various things in life that overwhelm us — like the overwhelming beauty of a sunset, or the overwhelming darkness of a violent assault, or whatever — and it is how we respond to those “overwhelmings” that determines the shape of our lives. Indeed, Ford argues that, because we will encounter both overwhelmingly good things and overwhelmingly evil things, we are forced to choose which overwhelming will be more foundational for how we live.
Therefore, the pursuit of justice defined as “living out the gratitude that is proper to those who are recipients of grace” requires that our lives be founded on an overwhelming encounter with God's grace and forgiveness. If this is the overwhelming that runs deeper than all others, then gratitude will naturally define us. We have encountered a God whose love for us is indescribable (I can't even find the words, staggering? profound? tender? powerful? overwhelming?). How, then, can we not live lives of gratitude?
Therefore, if this is the foundation of a Christian understanding of justice, what then are some of the implications for the Christian pursuit of justice?
First, this means that Christian justice will be marked by love. Christian justice is love because it flows from the place of being God's beloved — we are those who have been loved much; how can we not go forth to love others much as well? Thus, the pursuit of justice is nothing more than obedience to the command to “love your neighbour.” The dichotomy between love and justice (and God's love and justice, in particular) that is often made in various circles is absolutely false. Justice is the practice of gratitude-as-love within the context of injustice.
Secondly, and just as important, this means that Christian justice will be marked by forgiveness. Love and forgiveness are two sides of one coin but his point is often neglected (i.e. talk of forgiveness is ignored in social justice circles) or denied (i.e. forgiveness is seen as the opposite of justice in social justice circles) so it is worth pausing here. Here is the point that I want to make: the overwhelming that we encounter in God's love and forgiveness is greater than any overwhelming we encounter in the injustices that we personally experience. Therefore, the gratitude that flows from my state of being beloved is greater than the sorrow or anger I experience from the state of being wounded. Because of this, I am empowered to respond freely with forgiveness. This is why Paul can say that even in violent persecution, torture, and death, we are still “more than conquerors” because of the overwhelming love of God (Ro 8). Thus, Paul goes on to say that we should love, forgive, and do good to our enemies (Ro 12), just as Jesus tells us to go the extra mile, give to the thief, and turn the other cheek to the one who strikes us (Mt 5). Therefore, the only response that I can make to those who treat me unjustly is to live out the gratitude of a recipient of grace by forgiving the one who treats me this way.
This is why the notion of “justice-as-retribution” should be totally foreign to the Christian approach. This is why “vengeance” is reserved for God; it is reserved for God because the pursuit of vengeance is antithetical to the practices of gratitude. If we are truly grateful — as we will be if we have truly encountered God's love — then we will love and forgive. We are those who have been forgiven much, how can we not go forth and forgive others much as well?
[I should perhaps note that this talk of “forgiveness” should not sidetrack our resistance to, confrontation with, and excommunication of, oppressive powers but that's not the point I'm trying to make at the moment.]

The tragedy of the Church is that it has failed to be a place that heals brokenness. Therefore, Christians come to Church so overwhelmed by their own wounds, that they have no desire, or ability, to journey into the brokenness of others. Instead they run away from any broken people or places. Tragically, the Church becomes that which helps people to flee from brokenness instead of that which encourages us to journey into all brokenness so that all can be healed.
Another way of stating this tragedy would be as follows:
The tragedy of the Church is that it has failed to embody the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins and has, instead, attempted to aid in the flight from the world of Sin and Death, rather than being an agent of God's new creation.
(And if there is no healing, no forgiveness, and no new creation in our churches, then I can't help but wonder if there is no Spirit there as well…)

Because I am suspicious about the ways in which the language of “justice” is employed within our culture, I have tended to avoid that sort of language altogether (and have instead spoken of pursuing “cruciform love” and becoming “agents of God's new creation”). However, speaking at a conference called “Restoring Justice” forced me to, once again, confront “justice” language and try to think about what a Christian definition of “justice” might look like.
Some of these thoughts were still kicking around in the back of my mind when, as a part of my thesis research, I picked up a book by David A. deSilva called Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture (this book, by the way, is exceptional. It is both scholarly and easy to read [for those who don't have a background in biblical studies] and I think that it provides the lenses that are necessary for a more genuine — and more exciting! — read of the New Testament).
DeSilva's chapter on “Patronage and Reciprocity” is subtitled “The Social Context of Grace” and it is here that he provides a very interesting read on what the word “grace” would mean to those who lived during the times when the New Testament was written. However, in order to explore that point, I should probably explain what “patronage” is for those who don't know (I'll be summarising and simplifying deSilva).
The patronage that existed in the Greco-Roman culture was a system that was based upon the fact that access to goods was significantly limited. Most property, wealth, and goods were concentrated in the hands of the few and so one needed personal connections (rather than bureaucratic channels) in order to access those things. Thus, a “client” would go to a “patron” with a petition and, when that petition was granted, the client and patron would enter into a relationship of mutual exchange (reciprocity) wherein the patron would provide the client with the desired goods and the client would then do all that s/he could to enhance the fame and honour of the patron.
Now, where this begins to get intriguing is that it is precisely here, in this social context of patronage, that the language of “grace” must be properly understood. As deSilva says: “For the actual writers and readers of the New Testament… grace was not primarily a religious, as opposed to a secular, word.” In this context, grace actually has three layers of meaning:
(1) the word grace speaks of the generosity of the patron (e.g. “the patron was gracious”);
(2) the word grace also denotes the gift itself (e.g. “we have received grace upon grace”);
(3) the word also speaks of the response of the one who receives the gift (e.g. “we received the gift with gratitude”).
[In the Greek the relationship between these three examples may, perhaps, be more clear since the words employed — charis, charitas, and charin — all have the same root.]
Now, what is intriguing about this is that, when we keep definition (3) in mind, we come to realise that, as deSilva says, “grace must always be met with grace… there is no such thing as an isolated act of grace… To fail to return favor for favor is, in effect, to… destroy the beauty of the gracious act.”
Now, this already should get our wheels turning in terms of the whole grace vs. works debate that seems to persist in Christian circles, but instead of pursuing that thought, I want to continue to see how this relates to our understanding of justice.
Here is the bomb that deSilva drops:
“Gratitude toward one's patrons… was a prominent example in discussions of what it meant to live out the cardinal virtue of justice, a virtue defined as giving to each person his or her due.”
Now what is so shocking about this understanding of justice? Well, it requires us to undergo a fundamental paradigm shift. According to this understanding, justice then is not about ensuring that we receive what we are entitled to (i.e. our “human rights”). Rather, justice is living out the gratitude that is proper to those who are recipients of grace! Furthermore, since Christians are those who believe that they receive grace from a divine benefactor (God), justice could more concisely be defined as worship — and this should lead Christians to argue that any definition of justice that is not rooted here will be deficient. Suffice to say, this understanding of “justice” has significant implications for how we go about pursuing justice today.
By way of closing I would like to end with one more remark related to patronage. In speaking of the gratitude-as-loyalty that clients are to show to their patrons, deSilva notes that people can be clients of more than one patron, so long as those patrons are not at odds with one another. However, a person cannot be a client of patrons that are enemies or rivals because in order to by loyal and grateful to one, the client would have to be disloyal and ungrateful to the other. Thus deSilva writes the following:
“'No one can serve two masters' honorably in the context of these masters being at odds with one another, but if the masters are 'friends' or bound to each other by some other means, the client should be safe in receiving favors from both.”
The reference to “two masters” is, of course, a reference to Jesus' words in Mt 6. In light of deSilva's argument it seems that Jesus is making it clear that God and Mammon are two masters that are “at odds with one another.” God and Mammon are not friends, they are enemies, and one cannot serve both (and it should also be noted that Jesus makes it equally clear that one is already serving Mammon if one is simply collecting money!). This, I think, is a point that will be rejected by most middle-class Christians (liberal or conservative) who prefer to think of God and Mammon as friends that can both be served.

[B]oth Jesus and Paul are not so much trapped in a negation of global imperialism as engaged in establishing its positive alternative here below upon this earth.
~ John Dominic Crossan, In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom, 409.
In Part I of this series, I explored the idea of defining the Christian community as a “community of beggars.” I concluded that such a community cannot be sustained within the structures of capitalism and that Christians should, therefore, develop a political economics of “radical sharing and equally radical dependence.” Then, in Part II of this series, I continued to stress the need for Christians to move beyond capitalism. However, if we are to make that move, I suggested that we need to recover our genuinely Christian imagination, which is rooted in the hope that is inspired by the biblical narrative (and not rooted in the “realism” or “necessity” inspired by the narrative of capitalism). However, I also suggested that we have lost the ability to imagine a true alternative to capitalism because we have lost the will to live outside of the comforts that capitalism provides for us. Therefore, I concluded that we will only be able to imagine a genuine alternative to capitalism when we begin to embody the alternative that we are pursuing.
I would like to continue this series by exploring what an embodied alternative to capitalism might look like. What might a community of beggars look like in day-to-day life? How do “radical sharing” and “radical dependence” play out on street level?
However, before I do that, I would like to begin by suggesting that many of the answers to these questions are actually discovered “along the way.” By this I mean that we often spend too much time trying to find the most exact or ideal alternative to capitalism instead of beginning, step by step, to embody an alternative. Indeed, our pursuit of the ideal alternative often leaves us overwhelmed and hopelessly bogged down in the details, instead of leading us to action. However, this assertion needs to be prefaced in at least two ways.
First of all, recognising the ways in which our pursuit of ideals can lead to hopelessness or inaction should not lead us to the conclusion that serious reflection in inadvisable. Far from it. We need to think through things like Christianity and capitalism quite intently. The problem arises when we look to solve all the problems involved before we act. Contemplation can lead to great insight in one area and not in another area. In that case, we need to act upon the insight we gain, with the hope that that action will then open the door for insight into other (as of yet) puzzling areas. Thus, we are always to be “contemplatives in action.”
Secondly, recognising that we will not be able to implement the ideal result from the get-go, should not lead us to the sort of resignation that is satisfied with doing “just a bit more” than we were doing before. This, I fear, is part of the problem with the approach that people like Bono and Oprah take to charity. Bono and Oprah live lives that are marked by massive amounts of luxury, but they also regularly advocate for, or donate to, some sort of charitable cause. The implicit message in this is that I can have my cake and eat it too — i.e. I don't have to feel guilty about living opulently so long as I give just a little more to charity. That we cannot yet attain the ideal should not lead us to settle for less. Rather, we should be involved in an ongoing pursuit of that which is more ideal than what we have now. As with the rest of life, this means employing the metaphor of “journey.” Donating a little more to charity may be a good step on the way, but it is only one step along the way (and probably a small and introductory one), it is not the end-point. Thus, we need to learn to affirm each step, while also challenging ourselves and others to continue on the way.
Given this opening proviso, I would now like to suggest what I believe to be are a few good steps in the development of a Christian alternative to capitalism. Moving beyond mere criticisms, I would like to propose a Christian political economics of sharing (nonsensical charity) and dependence (nonsensical vulnerability).

[I]n our world “necessity” and “realism” have become ways to hide the lack of moral imagination.
~ C. W. Mills, from his “Pagan Sermon to a Christian Clergy.”
I concluded my last post by arguing that our Christian identity should “lead us to develop a communal (i.e. political) economics of radical sharing and equally radical dependence.” However, before I begin to explore what exactly that might look like, I would like to take a step back and address one further preliminary issue.
In a bracketed aside in the last post, I suggested that Christianity should lead us to conclude that capitalism is not simply “the best of all the bad options we have.” Unfortunately this position seems to be precisely the position taken by most people (Christian or otherwise) in our society. Indeed, the general contemporary consensus about capitalism seems to be a slightly revised version of what Winston Churchill had to say about democracy: “[Capitalism] is the worst form of [economics], except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” The consensus seems to be that capitalism is not perfect — indeed, we realise that it is far from perfect in many ways — but the catch is that, on the ground (as opposed to on paper), it does so much better than all the other options. Therefore, given this seeming reality of our situation, it is argued that the best we can do is to pursue “capitalism with a human face.”
In sum, we are told that capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best that we've got and it's here to stay — so let's make the best of it. Indeed, as Christians, it is our duty to make the best of it.
However, I would like to suggest that the pursuit of “capitalism with a human face” is nothing more than an effort to dress a wolf in sheep's clothing. Both “necessity” and “realism” lead us to conclude that this wolf is here to stay, so it's best if we just dress it in a way that makes us feel a little more comfortable in its presence.
That this has become the extent of our economic creativity as Christians suggests to me that we have become accustomed to living with a fatally deficient Christian imagination. When “realism” leads us to conclude that all we can do as Christians is dress wolves like sheep, then there is little or no hope that Christians will actually be a community that offers new life to the world. Consequently, we must learn to let the biblical narrative dictate what is realistic — and if we do this, then I suspect that we will discover that we are called to live as a people motivated by hope and not by necessity. Furthermore, we will discover that this hope is a hope that, rooted in a subversive memory of God's in-breaking into the world, transforms the present in ways that necessity can't even begin to, well, imagine.
Of course, there is nothing new in suggesting that we need to recover our Christian imagination. The opening quote from Mills was written in the 1960s and authors like Walter Brueggemann and Stanley Hauerwas have been talking about the importance of the Christian imagination for the last thirty years. Why then do we, as Christian communities, seem to still have no imagination? Well, I think the answer to the question can be found in another quote, which runs as follows:
What makes a subject hard to understand — if it's something significant and important — is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than the intellect.
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value.
What Wittgenstein teaches us, is that learning to imagine another way of living in this world may have less to do with our intellect and more to do with our will. That is to say, we may be able to begin to imagine another way of living in our minds, but we lack the will to actually embody that way of living in our daily lives, and so our imaginings never go very far. Simply put: we cannot imagine a Christian alternative to capitalism because we lack the will to begin the embodiment of that alternative.
Therefore, the crisis that we face is not only one of imagination, it is also one of willing. Christians in the West have become far too comfortable within the structures of capitalism (after all, the wolf prefers to eat people overseas and not the wonderful people in my neighbourhood — or so it seems) and, consequently, have imaginations that have run dry. We will begin to be able to imagine economic alternatives to capitalism when we begin to embody economic alternatives to capitalism. And it is one of those alternatives that I hope to begin to describe in my next post.

Christians think we are creatures that beg. Prayer is the activity that most defines who we are. Through prayer we learn the patience to take the time to beg, to beg to the One alone who is the worthy subject of such prayer. Through prayer Christians learn how to beg from each other. Christians, therefore, can never be at peace with a politics or economic arrangements built on the assumption that we are fundamentally not beggars.
~ Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, 241.
I came across this passage from Hauerwas about a year ago, and I've been turning it around in my mind since then. I imagine that those of us who are situated comfortably within liberal discourse about “human rights” might find this quotation a little upsetting. Indeed, if the language of “rights” tells us anything it tells us this: we are not beggars — we are entitled to life, freedom, happiness, and so much more. Therefore, one begins to see the way in which the language of “human rights” goes hand in hand with the political and economic structures of capitalism and rugged individualism. Operating from within a paradigm of entitlement, the question becomes “how much can I have?” or, better yet, “how much do I deserve?” And we only ever need a little convincing to conclude that we surely deserve more than we have right now.
However, if Christianity teaches us to understand ourselves as beggars, and teaches us to act accordingly, then Hauerwas is surely correct to suggest such an understanding would radically rework the political and economic arrangements of the Christian community (and it is important to emphasise that we are speaking of the Christian community here. As Christians we are seeking to model an alternative to the social order, not impose a more Christian structure on society — the sooner we realise this, the sooner we may be able to see that capitalism doesn't have to be considered “the best of all the bad options we have”). Furthermore, Hauerwas is also correct to emphasise that prayer teaches us to beg — both from God and from others. I suspect that anyone who has gone through times of material hardship quickly learns how closely connected these two types of begging are. I think of some of friends that panhandle — sure, they ask God to provide their daily bread, but that doesn't stop them asking strangers for change. I also think of when I first committed myself to getting through school without going into debt. Sure, I asked for God to help me, but I also quickly learned to beg from others in times of need. And this is precisely what prayer should teach us — to rely on God and the people of God.
Therefore, if Christians are those who know themselves to be beggars, then the Christian community should become a space where it is okay to beg. It should be a space where beggars are not shamed but welcomed. Of course, once such a safe space is created, we will all be able to admit our own needs — for all of us have such needs in our lives. However, we are usually too ashamed, too driven by pressures that tell us we need to be independent, and too driven by our own pride, to admit this. Creating a space where begging is welcomed, creates an honest space where we all are welcomed as we are — and not just as we try to appear to be. Indeed, this is what it means to be a part of a community that proclaims the forgiveness of sins. By allowing others (and ourselves) the space to beg, we create the room for confession and absolution in all the nitty-gritty parts of our lives.
And this, of course, flows out into the economic aspects of our lives (how can it not?). Allowing the structures of capitalism to dictate the economics of a community of beggars is fatal — because capitalism has no use for beggars. In fact, beggars are marginalised, jailed, or left to die precisely because beggars, by their very existence, challenge the validity of capitalism. Therefore, if Christians are to come to believe that capitalism is the only viable economic option for their communities, then they have already submitted themselves to that which seeks their destruction. Of course, by speaking in this way I am not suggesting that capitalism is out killing Christians (although it should probably be noted that capitalism is doing that too, just not usually in our neighbourhoods), rather what I mean is that surrendering to capitalism in this way is fatal to both our identity as Christians and our ability to act meaningfully as Christians within our contemporary situation.
Therefore, if Christian communities are to exist in a genuinely Christian way — as communities of beggars — then we must demonstrate a political and economic way of living that is different than the structures of capitalism. And, since we are prayer-shaped beggars, this will lead us to develop a communal (i.e. political) economics of radical sharing and equally radical dependence… but more on that later.